Life's Progress Through The Passions eBook

All men are born with seeds of good
and ill;
And each shoot forth, in more
or less degree: One you may cultivate with care
and skill,
But from the other
ne’er be wholly free.

The human mind may, I think, be compared to a chequer-work,
where light and shade appear by turns; and in proportion
as either of these is most conspicuous, the man is
alone worthy of praise or censure; for none there
are can boast of being wholly bright.

I believe by this the reader will be convinced he
must not expect to see a faultless figure in the hero
of the following pages; but to remove all possibility
of a disappointment on that score, I shall farther
declare, that I am an enemy to all romances,
novels, and whatever carries the air of them,
tho’ disguised under different appellations;
and as it is a real, not fictitious character
I am about to present, I think myself obliged, for
the reasons I have already given, as well as to gratify
my own inclinations, to draw him such as he was, not
such as some sanguine imaginations might with him
to have been.

I flatter myself, however, that truth will
appear not altogether void of charms, and the adventures
I take upon me to relate, not be less pleasing for
being within the reach of probability, and such as
might have happened to any other as well as the person
they did.—­Few there are, I am pretty certain,
who will not find some resemblance of himself in one
part or other of his life, among the many various and
surprizing turns of fortune, which the subject of this
little history experienced, as also be reminded in
what manner the passions operate in every stage of
life, and how far the constitution of the outward
frame is concerned in the emotions of the internal
faculties.

These are things surely very necessary to be considered,
and when they are so, will, in a great measure, abate
that unbecoming vehemence, with which people are apt
to testify their admiration, or abhorrence of actions,
which it very often happens would lose much of their
eclat either way, were the secret springs that
give them motion, seen into with the eyes of philosophy
and reflection.

But this will be more clearly understood by a perusal
of the facts herein contained, from which I will no
longer detain in the attention of my reader.

BOOK the First.

CHAP. I.

Shews, in the example of Natura, how from
our very birth, the passions, to which the human
soul is incident, are discoverable in us; and how
far the organs of sense, or what is called the constitution,
has an effect over us.

The origin of Natura would perhaps require more time
to trace than the benefit of the discovery would attone
for: it shall therefore suffice to say, that
his ancestors were neither of the highest rank:—­that